Associate Professor of Medicine

Emory University School of Medicine

Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics

Department of Biomedical Informatics

Biography

Research

Informatics focus

My group has designed, tested and validated innovative methods of leveraging the electronic medical record to track invasive device use for public reporting of hospital acquired conditions. Public reporting mandates, QI and health services research all require informatics innovations to maximize the secondary use of clinical data. Determining the methods to do this without creating major disruptions to clinical workflow is a priority area of our work. The CDC/NHSN and other reporting agencies are increasing looking to the electronic record to support surveillance efforts. Creating validated and clinically credible “e-measures” that are surrogates for subjective clinical measures is much of my focus. This year we were asked by the CDC/NHSN to develop a research proposal to apply our methods to antimicrobial stewardship activities and a $2 million proposal is under consideration. Additional work has focused on the use of NLP to augment quality measurement from the medical record.

Quality Improvement

My work in Quality Improvement has paralleled my informatics work and has focused on invasive device (central lines, urinary catheters) utilization and provider awareness of these devices. We designed and published original work on the “Idle central venous catheter” which has been widely cited. Provider checklists, daily rounds, multidisciplinary team rounds have all been utilized in my work on hospital acquired conditions. As the only hospitalist on HICPAC I am in a unique position to bring the perspective of hospital medicine clinical workflows to the national stage as new Catheter Associated Urinary Tract Infection Guidelines are under development by our group this year.

Farooki S, Chatfield M, Sebastian V, Knighton J, Conde JM, Applegate K, Chernetsky Tejedor SG. Automated Radiology Data and Information Transfer (ARDIT): A Pilot Study at Emory Healthcare in Conjunction with the American College of Radiology (ACR). The Journal of the American College of Radiology. (online April 2014, in press)